Art World

Lately, a strange phenomenon has occurred in the worlds of art and entertainment: So-called "art stars" of the 1980s have emerged from hibernation and are now showing up in all the old familiar places--in the glossy magazines and on the streets of New York--and some unfamiliar ones too, like on your local movie screen.

The installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery captures the magic of being in a crowd. His piles of brightly wrapped, bite-size candies and stacks of cheaply printed sheets of paper give physical form to the ways individuals get subsumed by massive groups. Simultaneously, facelessness and identity emerge from the contradictory sense of belonging that his art engenders.

On Monday, the Greek marble statue of a man playing a harp located in the center of the Prehistoric and Bronze Age Arts gallery at the J. Paul Getty Museum will be cloaked in black cloth. But it's not being prepped to be cleaned. Nor is there maintenance work to be done. Its concealment is emblematic of the creative loss in the arts community by AIDS.

With the publication of "Art -- A Sex Book" (Thames & Hudson), John Waters, who's collected such monikers as "Pope of Trash" and "Archangel of the Outrageous," can add "curator" to the list. The film director ("Hairspray," "Pink Flamingos") recently joined forces with curator and art critic Bruce Hainley to create an "exhibition in a book." The book unfolds through six "rooms" -- chapters introduced with a discussion between the men -- and features explicit images along with abstractions and pictures of installations that at first appear to have little to do with sex. (Artist Reiner Ruthenbeck's roomful of upended furniture, for example.

If you had to pick just one landscape to illustrate the curious obsessions of the L.A.-based Center for Land Use Interpretation, it might be this haunted high-desert wasteland two hours west of Salt Lake City. Glimpsed at 80 mph from the passing interstate, the stark panorama blurs into a mirage of dazzling white salt flats ringed by scrubby brown mountains. Here and there, a sun-bleached motel or abandoned car announces humanity's presence.

In "Mona Rogers in Person," a play written by Philip-Dimitri Galas, actress Helen Shumaker sings a few bars from "After You've Gone." In one of life's strange twists of fate, the lyrics Shumaker cynically sang to a lost lover in Galas' work now sadly apply to the late San Diego playwright, who died in 1986.

There was much clucking of tongues last fall when the New York Times Magazine ran a laudatory profile of New York mega-dealer Arne Glimcher of the Pace-Wildenstein Gallery. There was Glimcher on the cover surrounded by his stable of talent--all of them solidly established male artists on the downside of 50.

Shares of art auctioneer Sotheby's on Thursday had their biggest one-day drop after paintings by Vincent van Gogh and other famous artists failed to sell at an Impressionist art sale in New York -- prompting concern that Wall Street's woes will batter the art world. The auction Wednesday evening took in $269.7 million, including commissions. That was a third less than the low presale estimate of $401 million.

Peter MacKenzie could do wonders with a hammer and Alan R. McArthur could make sense of fuse box circuitry, but it seems that neither knew the difference between a Baldini and a Modigliani--much less how to fence them. It was this naivete, authorities said, that more than anything else landed them in jail this week as suspects in the theft of $9 million in master artworks from a Northridge storage facility.

At an age when most artists have left their angry-young-man phase well behind them, Llyn Foulkes continues to wave that flag with fury. Midway through a meeting at his Topanga Canyon studio, the 60-year-old painter erupts with the despairing declaration: "It's just so unfair!" It, of course, is everything from the politics of the art world to life itself.